With large capacity drives (greater than 1TB), RAID5 is not a good option. The chance of a second drive failure during rebuild is very real.

For that reason, for most enterprise gear these days, for reliability with large drives, RAID10 for speed, or RAID6 (or a variant thereof) for capacity is recommended. There are also some newer block protection options that protect blocks rather than whole disks.

Sure, but all my data is backed up on a large nas raid 6 array, with a second copy on a raid5 nas... :-)

Down the rabbit hole I go.Well I got the new Mac up and running. Was a little disappointed at the SSD speeds. Turns out the Mini has Sata III whereas the Pro only offers Sata II speeds. Should have done more research.The mini was getting right at 500mbs, the Pro...250mbs.Anyway, I ordered two 8gb sticks from OWC to give me the magic 24gb ram, and an adapter to mount the SSD in its proper place.The SSD speed was driving me insane. There was no way, I was gonna let the Mini whip my new prized machine. Instead of ordering the OWC Accelsior, I opted for the Sonnet SSD Pro. I already had a 500gb SSD so why not use it. It will also allow me to add a second SSD in the future for 1tb of Raid0 performance.Also, Mom is trading me a Sapphire 7950 (Mac Edition) for my Mini. All of this will come together Monday.I am keeping up with benchmarks along the way in case anyone cares. I realize benchmarks don't tell the whole story, but again, I find comfort in numbers.

As far as real world use, everything definitely runs smoother. Was it worth it? I can say with some confidence that dollar for dollar, the Mini is a much better bargain for someone that already has a monitor they like.Update forthcoming..............

Thanks for sharing your progress. I've not compared the OWC Accelcior E2 to the Sonnet option side-by-side, although I did consider each when I configured mine. I would expect performance to be similar. I'm very happy with the throughput via PCIe compared with the SATA specs. I'll be interested in your experience with the Sonnet card and your SSDs on it.

The problem is not the processors but the engineering of the motherboard. The latest versions of the Mac OS X will not install on pre-2008 Mac Pro Quad computers though they have more than enough CPU power with their Xenon processors. I do batch processing of a several thousand RAW files and the 2007 machine was more than adequate with the limitation being the DASD and I dealt with that by using two internal RAID pairings.

The batch processing took under an hour and it makes little business sense to buy a faster machine for $3000 with the same drive configuration and maybe get that job to complete within 45 minutes. The 2007 is fast enough for video editing except for the fact that the newest video cards are not supported by the older OS X and I cannot run the new level. I decided to by a HP tower computer instead for $800 and go back to using Windows.

Well, its been a while since I last posted. I am so glad I made the purchase of a 2012 instead of the new Mac Pro. So far I have upgraded the Ram to 24gb, upgraded the video card to a Radeon 7950, and installed SSD on the PCIe slot. Future upgrades include more ram, adding another SSD for Raid 0 performance,and swapping out the optical drive for a BluRay burner (to archive my BluRay collection)There was a downside. Capture one didn't show a significant improvement, Media Pro, almost no improvement. The rest of my apps, especially Nikon Capture NX2, are a lot peppier.After seeing the price and specs of the Mac Pro, this seems to be a better solution, money wise. (That is if you want to stay with the Apple OS)All that being said, I am not a fan of the new Cylinder and its lack of internal expandability. The price point is way too high for a more disposable product. My setup is by no means future proof, but It still has an upgrade path.